Painting is like silent poem, said Simonides, poet from ancient Greece.Paintings are icons, doors to the Platonian world above the heavens. Paintings on my blog are just those icons, which lead a viewer into the magic world of harmony and beauty. Artists who present their achievements on my blog have a very different cultural and national background, they represent variety of artistic traditions and schools

Lucio Muñoz (December 27, 1929 – May 24, 1998) was a Spanish abstract painter and engraver.Muñoz was the son of Lucio Muñoz, a shopkeeper, and Nicolasa Martínez. Born on December 27, 1929 in Madrid, he was the youngest of two brothers and three sisters.His mother died in 1935.In 1949, Muñoz enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Fernando, Cádiz, where he obtained a degree in Fine Arts. While at the school, he met Amalia Avia; they married on January 15, 1960. The first of their four children was born that yearMuñoz's first one-man exhibition was at the Sala de la Direccion General de Bellas Artes in Madrid, in 1955.

During a stay in Paris financed by a Spanish government scholarship in 1955–6, Muñoz was influenced by the art informel movement.He worked with various materials, such as burnt paper and wood, in addition to canvas. He pierced, bent, and made cuts in the canvas, like informalist artists. He is particularly known for his innovation in his works on wood, which he fully incorporated into the works; burns, carving, and paint mixed with materials such as marble dust, sawdust, and pulverized minerals were among the techniques he used to create the works he referred to as pseudo-paintings.His works are in informal colours, with black predominating. The style of his later works was less aggressive, because he used other materials.In 1964, Galería Juana Mordó was opened. He belonged to the associated group of painters from the moment of its foundation until 1991.His works include murals for the European Union building in Brussels and the chamber of the Madrid Parliament. His mural at the Basilica of Aránzazu won the Gold Medal at the Salzburg Biennial of Sacred Art.Wikipedia

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality". Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself.Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement.Wikipedia

"In Paris in the 1930s Surrealist artists and designers began to radically blur the boundaries between art and commerce, plundering each others’ toolboxes for a new and more daring language. Surrealist artists regularly distorted and reconfigured the body. They used corresponding fashion-related imagery including mannequins and cuttings from fashion magazines, as seen in Conroy Maddox’s The Cloak of Secrecy, 1940 and André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy’s Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse), 1938.This in turn led the fashion industry into braver, more unsettling territory. Designer Elsa Schiaparelli worked with artist Salvador Dalí to create a wide range of clothing including skeleton and lobster dresses, while photographer Man Ray transformed fashion photographs into works of art.Surreal approaches to fashion have continued to this day with flamboyant characters like Leigh Bowery, Isabella Blow, Björk and Lady Gaga. They can also still be found across contemporary catwalks as demonstrated by designers Gareth Pugh, Philip Treacy, Viktor & Rolf, Comme des Garçons and many more.As the following pages demonstrate, students at Galashiels have gained a solid understanding of the relationship between Surrealism and fashion which has greatly influenced their designs."(www.nationalgalleries.org)

Jan Zrzavy (5 November 1890 – 12 October 1977) was a leading Czech painter, graphic artist, and illustrator of the 20th century.He was born in Okrouhlice near Německý Brod in Bohemia (present-day Czech Republic). He studied privately in Prague and then attended the UMPRUM there for 2 years starting in 1907, before being expelled. He first visited France in 1907, returning to Paris and Brittany frequently until 1939, but maintaining close links to his homeland.After the war he became an associate professor at Palacký University of Olomouc from 1947 to 1950. Later he maintained private studios in Prague and Okrouhlice. He grew increasingly recognized on a national and international level in the 1950s and 1960s, and was honoured a title of a National Artist in 1965. He died in Prague on October 12, 1977.Zrzavý was a key member of the Czech, and more broadly European, modernism movement the early part of the 20th century. Although he is regarded as a symbolist he was heavily influenced by European Medieval art. Throughout his life he was also inspired by spectacular landscapes, both abroad (France, Italy, and Greece) as well as in his native country (Vodňany, Okrouhlice, Prague). He reworked many of his themes multiple times. He was admired by and written about by one of the founders of the Czech artistic movement called Poetism, Karel Teige.Wikipedia

Theodore Roszak (May 1, 1907 – September 2, 1981) was a Polish-American sculptor and painter. He was born in Posen, Prussia (German Empire), now Poznań, Poland, as a son of Polish parents, and emigrated to the United States at the age of two.From 1925 to 1926 he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, In 1930 he won the Logan Medal of the Arts, then moved to New York City to take classes at the National Academy of Design with George Luks and at Columbia University, where he studied logic and philosophy.Roszak established a studio in New York City in 1932 and worked as an artist for the Works Progress Administration during the depression before going back to Chicago to teach at the Art Institute. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College throughout the 1940s and 1950s and at Columbia University from 1970 to 1973. He was a participating artist at the documenta II in Kassel 1959 and at the Venice Biennale in 1960. Roszak's sculpture, at first closer to Constructivism and displaying an industrial aesthetic, changed after around 1946 to a more expressionistic style.Roszak was affiliated with the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy in Rome, and the National Academy of Design. He served on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 1963 to 1969. He received the Logan Medal of the Arts (1930), a Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (1931), and the Eisendrath Award of the Art Institute of Chicago (1934). Roszak was also an accomplished violinist, and liked to use musical references in his artworks. Roszak died in New York City, where he lived.Wikipedia

Cai Guo-Qiang (born 8 December 1957) is a Chinese artist who currently lives and works in New York City.Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China. His father, Cai Ruiqin, was a calligrapher and traditional painter who worked in a bookstore. As a result, Cai Guo-Qiang was exposed early on to Western literature as well as traditional Chinese art forms.As an adolescent and teenager, Cai witnessed the social effects of the Cultural Revolution first-hand, personally participating in demonstrations and parades himself. He grew up in a setting where explosions were common, whether they were the result of cannon blasts or celebratory fireworks. He also “saw gunpowder used in both good ways and bad, in destruction and reconstruction”.It seems that Cai has channeled his experiences and memories through his numerous gunpowder drawings and explosion events.In his late teens and early twenties, Cai Guo-Qiang acted in two martial art films, The Spring and Fall of a Small Town and Real Kung Fu of Shaolin. Later intrigued by the modernity of Western art forms such as oil painting, he studied stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy from 1981 to 1985. The experience allowed him a more comprehensive understanding of stage practices and a much-heightened sense for theater, spatial arrangements, interactivity, and teamwork

Cai Guo-Qiang's practice draws on a wide variety of symbols, narratives, traditions and materials such as fengshui, Chinese medicine, shanshui paintings, science, flora and fauna, portraiture, and fireworks. Much of his work draws on Maoist/Socialist concepts for content, especially his gunpowder drawings which strongly reflect Mao Zedong's tenet "destroy nothing, create nothing." Cai has said: “In some sense, Mao Zedong influenced all artists from our generation with his utopian romance and sentiment." Cai’s importance when considered on the parallel history of Chinese contemporary art is "critical," as he was among the first artists to contribute to discussions of Chinese art, however geographically dispersed, as a viable intellectual narrative with its own historical context and theoretical framework.Wikipedia